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one, in which we think it is summed up in the words
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
Even the vulgarest melodrama or detective story can
be good if it expresses something of the delight in
sinister possibilities—­the healthy lust
for darkness and terror which may come on us any night
in walking down a dark lane. If, therefore, nonsense
is really to be the literature of the future, it must
have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world
must not only be the tragic, romantic, and religious,
it must be nonsensical also. And here we fancy
that nonsense will, in a very unexpected way, come
to the aid of the spiritual view of things. Religion
has for centuries been trying to make men exult in
the ‘wonders’ of creation, but it has
forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful
so long as it remains sensible. So long as we
regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably
created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder
at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious
wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies
for no reason in particular that we take off our hats,
to the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything
has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the
patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other
side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain
of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs,
a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the
sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a
cripple with only two.

This is the side of things which tends most truly
to spiritual wonder. It is significant that in
the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of
Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not
(as has been represented by the merely rational religionism
of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered
beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary,
a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of
it. ‘Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert
where no man is?’ This simple sense of wonder
at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence
of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions,
is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of
nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the
conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic
assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of
things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw
out Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning person
who, by merely studying the logical side of things,
has decided that ‘faith is nonsense,’ does
not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back
to him in the form that nonsense is faith.

* * * *
*

A DEFENCE OF PLANETS

A book has at one time come under my notice called
’Terra Firma: the Earth not a Planet.’
The author was a Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott, and he quoted
very seriously the opinions of a large number of other
persons, of whom we have never heard, but who are
evidently very important. Mr. Beach of Southsea,
for example, thinks that the world is flat; and in
Southsea perhaps it is. It is no part of my present
intention, however, to follow Mr. Scott’s arguments
in detail. On the lines of such arguments it
may be shown that the earth is flat, and, for the matter
of that, that it is triangular. A few examples
will suffice: